Gave this a bit of a play and in doing so, unearthed just how rusty I am at playing Keen. Anyway my impression is this is a reasonably well-presented piece of work into which quite a lot of work went - new font, well written story text and of course some good levels and a nice map. I always hate to see recolourisations of original graphics in mods, as to me it seems like the modder isn't quite showing their delight in their power to modify. (Yes I know I put some Nukum tiles in my Venus mod but that was just one small novelty area ). Anyway in the case of this Fireblaze mod I think that so much work went into this that it might have only taken an extra hour or two to replace remaining original graphics with serviceable replacements. I do quite like the sprites - clearly like myself the modder is not fully accomplished at making animation sequences but they do look quite good in their own right. As always, we can but hope that Sunstriker Mods/88vega keep up their efforts. From the in game text it does not appear that the PCKF community (or even Andy Durdin and the other arch-patriarchs/matriarchs of modding) are mentioned. Likewise, Sunstriker has written quite a lovely little accompanying RTF file (I did enjoy a little bolus of nostalgia upon seeing that old file format ) but again credit is only afforded to ID themselves and the implication is, in fact, that all patching is the work of 88vega. I am not entirely sure if he is correct in stating that the mod is Freeware - for sure he can place the exact intellectual property he has created in the public domain if he likes but as far as I am aware Keen1 remains Shareware. Regardless, the nature of the Keen community and its work is such that none of these things actually matter a whole lot... anyway these days any news is good news where modding is concerned.

To be fair, "shareware" is a term that most people don't get to read all that much these days and probably would have to look up elsewhere. Even my computer science teacher didn't know the difference between "shareware" and "public domain", and that was back around 2003 or something like that.

As long as the author of the mod does no sell it for profit, which he clearly doesn't, everything should be fine.

By the way, how many modern games actually list the tools that were used to create them? I think modders only list these as a hint for other people who might want to create their own mods. I guess it's okay for somebody not involved with the modding community (or at least not our modding community) to omit that.

And after taking a look at the patch file, I guess it's fair to say that most of this could have been done by anyone who knows the basics of x86 machine code. And even if the author didn't create all the patches himself, I don't see any authors mentioned on the random patch page I just visited on the KeenWiki, nor did I see the phrase "If you find this information helpful in a project you're working on, please give credit where credit is due." anywhere.